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Harvey Shapiro, Poet and Editor, Dies at 88

Harvey Shapiro, an admired American poet who chose newspaper work over the time-honored academic vocation of his peers, and who as an editor at The New York Times made an epochal assignment — what became the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail” — that ultimately never appeared in the newspaper, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 88.

The cause was complications of recent surgery, his son Saul said.

Mr. Shapiro the poet was the author of a dozen books, published between 1953 and 2006. In spare, often epigrammatic style, his work explored the world around him, from street scenes to intimate portraits of family life, with its attendant pleasures and pain. It also examined what it meant for him to exist in that world — as a man, a husband, a father and a Jew.

In “The Mother of Invention,” published in Bomb magazine in 2011, Mr. Shapiro wrote:

On my desk are the bills from the livingand in my sleep are the bills from the dead.

“Emptiness is the mother of invention”says my fortune cookie. July 23, 2010.Brooklyn. I walk in the slow rain,never less accomplished, never happier.

Why should I doubt the world has meaningwhen even in myself I see mysterious purposes.

A crow drops down for a moment,black, rabbinical garb, croaking Kaddish.

Mr. Shapiro the editor was associated with The Times from 1957 until his retirement in 1995. He was variously an editor at The New York Times Magazine; the editor of The Times Book Review, a post he held from 1975 to 1983; and deputy editor of the magazine. In the early 1960s, as an editor at The Times Magazine, Mr. Shapiro made what was almost certainly his most inspired assignment. Reading about one of Dr. King’s frequent jailings, he telephoned the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The next time Dr. King was in jail for any significant period, Mr. Shapiro suggested, he should compose a letter for publication.

In April 1963, while jailed in Birmingham, Ala., Dr. King did just that. But according to several published accounts, including “Carry Me Home” (2001), Diane McWhorter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning chronicle of the civil rights movement, Mr. Shapiro was unable to persuade his superiors at the magazine to print it.

“Letter From Birmingham Jail,” which endures as one of the canonical texts of the civil rights movement, was published instead in The Christian Century, The New Leader and elsewhere.

Throughout his newspaper career, Mr. Shapiro continued writing poetry, with his work centering not only on small domestic subjects but also on vast ones like war and the pulsating life of cities.

Photo

The poet Harvey Shapiro in 1975, the year he began his tenure as the editor of The New York Times Book Review.Credit
The New York Times

New York loomed especially large, with landmarks like Schrafft’s and Russ & Daughters, the purveyor of smoked fish, bagels and other stuff of life on East Houston Street, threading their way companionably through his verse. Hart Crane was an early influence, Mr. Shapiro often said; Charles Reznikoff was a later one.

Here, in its entirety, is Mr. Shapiro’s poem “New York Notes,” from his collection “How Charlie Shavers Died and Other Poems” (2001):

1.Caught on a side streetin heavy traffic, I saidto the cabbie, I shouldhave walked. He replied,I should have been a doctor.

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2.When can I get on the 11:33I ask the guy in the information boothat the Atlantic Avenue Station.When they open the doors, he says.I am home among my people.

Harvey Irwin Shapiro was born in Chicago on Jan. 27, 1924, to an observant Jewish family. His first words were Yiddish. When he was a boy, the family moved to Manhattan and later to Woodmere, on Long Island.

Mr. Shapiro’s studies at Yale were interrupted by World War II. Enlisting in the Army Air Forces, he flew 35 combat missions over Europe as a B-17 tail gunner and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Mr. Shapiro earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Yale in 1947 and a master’s degree in American literature from Columbia the next year.

In the mid-1950s, after teaching English at Cornell University and Bard College, Mr. Shapiro became an assistant editor at Commentary magazine. He was briefly the poetry editor (and an ad salesman) at The Village Voice and a fiction editor at The New Yorker before joining The Times.

Mr. Shapiro’s marriage to Edna Lewis Kaufman ended in divorce. A resident of Brooklyn Heights, he is survived by his companion, Galen Williams; two sons, Saul and Dan, from his marriage to Ms. Kaufman; and three grandchildren.

His other volumes of poetry include “The Eye” (1953), “The Light Holds” (1984) and “National Cold Storage Company” (1988). Mr. Shapiro also edited a well-received anthology, “Poets of World War II,” published by the Library of America in 2003.

As poets will, Mr. Shapiro sometimes wondered, poetically, how his own life would end. In these lines from “In a Bad Time,” published in his last collection, “The Sights Along the Harbor” (2006), he concluded thus:

Who created you? Jacob J. Shapiroand Dorothy Cohen. They created me,and my dead sister, Annette, and myyounger brother, Allan. Who will uncreateyou? Impossible to predict just nowbut my money is on pastrami.

A version of this article appears in print on January 8, 2013, on Page B14 of the New York edition with the headline: Harvey Shapiro, Poet and Editor, Dies at 88. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe